Takeaways from Japan’s Report on Internet Usage

A government survey on Internet usage indicates that Japanese are not as addicted to surfing the Web as their fellow Netizens in other parts of the world. It also shows Japanese are less likely to use their real names when tweeting in cyberspace. Here are five takeaways from the report released Tuesday.

The amount of data transferred in Japan shot up 68% in 2013 from the previous year to 13.5 exabytes, nine times higher than the volume in 2005. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes of information. Former Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt has famously said only five exabytes of information were created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, though it is not entirely clear how he came up with that figure.

Based on a 20-question section in the survey on Internet usage, only 8.2% of Japanese were found to be highly addicted to the Web, compared with 15% of Americans, 12% of Brits and 8.9% of South Koreans.

Although the number of smartphone users continues to rise in Japan, 26% of those surveyed said they still only owned a regular cellphone. That percentage was only 1.6% in Singapore, 8.4% in South Korea and 12% in the United States. The white paper said this is likely because Japan’s older generation prefer Japan’s feature phones instead of the latest high-tech handsets.

Japan’s twittering masses prefer to remain anonymous. Only 19% of Japanese said they use their real name on their Twitter account, compared with 56% of Americans and 55% of South Koreans. Not that it makes much difference. Over 60% of Japanese respondents in the survey said they can likely be identified even if they try to tweet incognito.

Only 9.5% of Japanese said they frequently change their passwords, compared with 19% of Americans and 20% of French. That’s despite having an ever increasing number of online accounts. Over 47% of respondents said smartphones had added to their tally of e-accounts.